Library Weblog & News

The Fire Inside: The Story and Poetry of Nikki Giovanni

2007-01-22 10:23:31

Cleveland Public Library will host the debut stage reading of the Karamu House production of "The Fire Inside: The Story and Poetry of Nikki Giovanni," on Saturday, February 17 at 3:00 p.m. in the Louis Stokes Wing Auditorium, the Main Library, 325 Superior Avenue.

Written by Susan Watson Turner and directed by Terrence Spivey, artistic director of Karamu, "The Fire Inside" presents an ensemble cast in a dramatization of the life and works of the dynamic African American poet. The script follows Giovanni's career from her early years in the Black Arts Movement through her writing and life today.

The play will make its world debut in July at Cleveland's annual Ingenuity Festival.

Giovanni was born in 1943 in Knoxville, Tennessee, but grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio. She graduated with honors from Fisk University and has been on the faculty at Virginia Tech since 1987. Her fiery first book of poems, Black Feeling, Black Talk (1968) sold more than 10,000 copies. That book and others such as Re: Creation (1970), Poem of Angela Yvonne Davis (1970) and The Women and the Men (1975), comprised a powerful statement on African-American womanhood and established her as one of the leading figures of the Black Arts Movement